Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks

[kpete]

Source: Wired

Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks

* By Noah Shachtman Email Author
* December 9, 2010 |

It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial.

Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations, issued the Dec. 3 “Cyber Control Order” — obtained by Danger Room — which directs airmen to “immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET,” the Defense Department’s secret network. Similar directives have gone out to the military’s other branches.

“Unauthorized data transfers routinely occur on classified networks using removable media and are a method the insider threat uses to exploit classified information. To mitigate the activity, all Air Force organizations must immediately suspend all SIPRNET data transfer activities on removable media,” the order adds.

It’s one of a number of moves the Defense Department is making to prevent further disclosures of secret information in the wake of the WikiLeaks document dumps. Pfc. Bradley Manning says he downloaded hundreds of thousands of files from SIPRNET to a CD marked “Lady Gaga” before giving the files to WikiLeaks.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/military-bans-disks-threatens-courts-martials-to-stop-new-leaks/

[Hawkeye-X]

1. Ok. I'll carry my battery then.

It's a hidden USB stick. And it has the encrypted file that was downloaded off the torrent.

Oh wait. I'm not in the military. Nevermind. Carry on.

[NavyDem]

7. It's up to the individual IT personnel to set up...

But USB and CD/CDR/DVD can be disabled through group policy or through the registry on any Windows based computer. The last 2 years I was on active duty, I wrote GPOs to handle just that. Portable USB devices have been banned DoD wide since late 2008.

[Kaleko]

2. Sweating bullets now. Good. The truth won't be stopped anyhow.

[NaturalHigh]

3. The headline is a little bit misleading.

When I was in the Air Force, it was always against regulations to take removable media (floppy disks back then), cameras, or recording devices into areas where classified material was disseminated. I'm not against what Wikileaks has done; I support Wikileaks in fact. I just wanted to point out that this directive is not new.

John Anthony Walker used a small camera to steal top secret material and sell it to the Russians. It's understandable that the military would enact safeguards to protect classified information.

[JackInGreen]

4. Agreed

But more often now the base networks are so full of holes and backdoors unless their entirely closed nets it's not even funny.

[NavyDem]

8. Still is prohibited. n/t

[ngant17]

5. spy satellites can detect EMF radiation

emanating from a computer keyboard and monitor, i.e. Echelon and Tempest. From shorter distances, there are always laser and wireless eavesdropping. Which is to say, before the data is even encrypted. This is hardly new technology, some of this capability was in use 20 years ago. IOW you don't need to do old-fashioned downloads onto a flashdrive. That's for the little guys, the ones they can use as a patsy. Who needs to copy onto flashdrives when you can just gather the EMF signals via satellite, and noise is filtered out.

There's no way to know from where the Wikileaks docs originally came. It could have been gathered by any number of elaborate and secret methods. Assange is just the convenient patsy here. There's always the possibility some shadowy government (foreign or domestic) agency had a hand in it.

High frequency noise emitted by a CPU can contain information. Advances in surveillance technology on a quantum level will make it difficult to mask electronic radiation.

[Pavulon]

6. Ever looked through a telescope

seen that shimmer? same for emf.